Storage Made Easy Links Clouds for Unified File Sync and Share

Posted on February 14, 2014 By Pedro Hernandez

Storage Made Easy, a London-based data storage software specialist, is bringing private and public file storage, sync and share under a single management umbrella. And its approach is garnering the attention of some early investors.

The company announced this week that it had raised $1 million in a second seed round, bringing its total to $2.5 million. The money will help fund the expansion of sales operations pertaining to its on-premise enterprise product, Cloud Control.

Cloud Control is the firm's enterprise file share and sync gateway. The software-based appliance, delivered as VMware OVF compliant software, centralizes storage management, enabling organizations to secure, monitor and control both their private and public cloud file resources.

The product supports over 40 public clouds, including Amazon, Box, Dropbox, Google, Salesforce, SkyDrive (soon to be OneDrive) and Windows Azure, to list a few. Other features include AES 256 bit encryption, file auditing capabilities and Active Directory integration. The cloud-enabled software can be deployed on an enterprise's "own servers, on their existing service provider's servers, or IaaS infrastructures such as Amazon EC2 and Linode," said the company.

The tech combats cloud sprawl, enabling IT departments to head off rogue clouds within their own organizations. "Ultimately it is all about what we call Cloud control -- whether that Cloud is private, public or hybrid, IT needs to have a governance point to securely control data," added Jim Liddle, Storage Made Easy's CEO.

Liddle also believes the tech will open up more market opportunities.

"We are competing with other companies in the private Enterprise file sharing space that have had access to hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars," said Liddle in a statement. He credits his team and the company's product differentiation in helping the company score "sales against both cash rich VC startups in our space as well as established companies."

"We already have some exciting wins to announce in the next few months as well as a brand new product launch that will further differentiate us from the competition in the enterprise space," he teased.

Customers include Huddle, a cloud collaboration company, and cosmetics maker Lush. It is on pace to double sales for the 2013/2014 fiscal year, forecasts the company.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.